http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2...ooks_N.htm

"TOKYO — When Mio Honzawa starts fifth grade next April, her textbooks will be thicker.

Alarmed that its children are falling behind those in rivals such as South Korea and Hong Kong, Japan is adding about 1,200 pages to elementary school textbooks. The textbooks across all subjects for six years of elementary school now total about 4,900 pages, and will go up to nearly 6,100.

In a move that has divided educators and experts, Japan is going back to basics after a 10-year experiment in "pressure-free education," which encouraged more application of knowledge and less rote memorization... "


They should just add a course to elementary schools, "How to Ace the Programme for International Student Assessment" and give them compilations of previous PISAs w/ tips and tricks instead of textbooks.

This is a response to the introduction of ゆとり教育 'pressure free education' which many people blame for sending Japans education system down the toilet. I'm sure it's not just Japan's system that is bad though. I think one major problem with English education (which is where my experience lies) is that all the thought and reform is going into how things are taught rather than what is taught. Japanese educators think omg our students can't speak and therefore shift a lot of the focus to communicative based activities involving roleplaying with scripted dialogues, when the real reasons Japanese students suck is lack of knowledge (especially vocabulary but also grammar which most teachers have no idea how to teach). Meanwhile kids at good private schools are taught basic grammar in half the time and are effectively fluent by the time they hit highschool.

nadiatims Wrote:I think one major problem with English education (which is where my experience lies) is that all the thought and reform is going into how things are taught rather than what is taught. Japanese educators think omg our students can't speak and therefore shift a lot of the focus to communicative based activities involving roleplaying with scripted dialogues, when the real reasons Japanese students suck is lack of knowledge (especially vocabulary but also grammar which most teachers have no idea how to teach).

It's kinda off topic anyway, but I'm not sure I agree with this. I think the biggest reason Japanese students can't speak English is that the teaching style in Japan is the teacher-lectures-in-front-of-the-class students-sit-quietly-and-listen model. So when it comes to a subject where that model doesn't work, in this case language study, the students don't do so well. Even if you try to do student-centered language learning the student's don't know how to do it at all. They're so used to just sitting quietly that it's hard to get them to do otherwise.

Not that Japan is doing particularly badly overall. Most of the articles that show that the Japanese are doing way worse than other countries in English education are completely ridiculous because they're based on statistics that are being used incorrectly (for example, using the scores of tests which are taken by the general public of all ages in Japan, but only elites interested in English business opportunities in places like China and Korea, and then comparing them and claiming that Japanese English education is worse than Chinese or Korean English education)

In other subjects, Japan has been doing very well for a long while. People in Japan are noticeable more well-informed in mathematics and science than Americans (who, frankly, have a pathetically low understanding of science) as well as quite a few other developed countries.

Probably Japan's sinking test scores are related more to the rise of other social problems, rather than the introduction of pressure free education. I don't have any evidence to back that up, but it would be my guess.

If they want to try something really radical, they could have all learning based on Anki from grade 7 onward. Wouldn't help with elementary school though.

Is it natural for scores to sink?
In cases where a new test is introduced, scores sink compared to previous tests and then come up as people find ways to beat the test / teach to the test better.

I'm not a scientist. Why do I need understanding of science? I am a validation specialist. I am annoyed when my co-workers cannot do a simple lethality calculation.
It's on page 13 of this document (couldn't find on wikipedia - must be an education problem ). And then times time for accumulated lethality which predicts sterilization effectiveness. It's simple algebra. About half the people in my department cannot do it. We use a computer to do this calculation always. But it is simple enough - I think you should be able to do it by hand so you understand how it works.

I don't know if fattening the textbooks is an appropriate response to the problem, but at least they're trying something. I have a few middle school level Japanese textbooks on history, politics, etc., and they ARE quite small. The content and quality of the textbooks seems far better than what I've used in public school, though. They happened to come with a middle school student's sticky notes, too, which were far more detailed than anything I saw in middle school. I can't read them though. Yay Japanese illiteracy. T_T

It seems like the U.S. is really backwards on education reform, especially when looking at the abysmal ranks shown in the article. Every headline about education shows how our budgets are failing, the Texan government is taking important historical figures away from the core curriculum, etc. At least our top universities are still top-notch.

Tzadeck Wrote:Probably Japan's sinking test scores are related more to the rise of other social problems

Which social problems? I am really interested, because I think the reason a lot of American schools are failing is as much a social problem as a policy problem. Where I went to school, if a kid valued his or her education, the kid could generally succeed in school. There were some exceptions, but that was generally the case. Those who didn't want to learn, however, simply didn't learn.

That's good. Carrying around all those textbooks should make Japanese kids less scrawny. Their women will have no need to sleep with foreign men anymore

juniperpansy Wrote:That's good. Carrying around all those textbooks should make Japanese kids less scrawny. Their women will have no need to sleep with foreign men anymore

I think the forum you were looking for is gaijinpot. Grow up.

Can't stand Japan's schooling system. Ridiculously subjugating, strict, competitive and archaic. Western schooling is already pathetic enough with its ineffective teaching methods and restriction of students' freedom to study what they wish, Japan just goes an extra level. Then again, Hong Kong is even worse.

I was homestaying in Japan this last summer for a month, and I visited both a middle school and a high school.

Middle school seemed relatively similar to American school. I mean, you go there, you have friends, you talk and have fun during passing periods, and when it comes to class time you sit at your desk and do the work.

High school was totally different. The kids seemed muzzled, quiet, and under a huge amount of stress. They lived on a test to test basis, worrying about what they would get more than learning the material. The classes were the most boring thing I had ever seen, not just because my Japanese sucked but because they were not interactive at all, ever. The teachers were boring, mean, and often didn't have a care for the student's well-being. A couple teachers did try to be a little more hands on, but rarely.

Not to mention the English teacher would speak English like she was reading Katakana...
"Ai Gou tsu za sutoa tsu bai samu miruku."

Yeah, that's english alright!

And when my host brother (who lived in America for 2 years so he was decent) wrote "What do you think of my plan?" the teacher marked him off because he didn't write "What do you think about my plan?"

I mean COME ON! I told him it was okay.

zachandhobbes Wrote:And when my host brother (who lived in America for 2 years so he was decent) wrote "What do you think of my plan?" the teacher marked him off because he didn't write "What do you think about my plan?"

I mean COME ON! I told him it was okay.

Grammar machines ASSEMBLE!

My college professor told me the same thing. She didn't mark it off, though, because she wasn't teaching an English class.

kazelee Wrote:

zachandhobbes Wrote:And when my host brother (who lived in America for 2 years so he was decent) wrote "What do you think of my plan?" the teacher marked him off because he didn't write "What do you think about my plan?"

I mean COME ON! I told him it was okay.

Grammar machines ASSEMBLE!

My college professor told me the same thing. She didn't mark it off, though, because she wasn't teaching an English class.

That's the stupid thing about English classes in general: apparently something is incorrect because the impenetrable laws of grammar say so. Surely 'correctness' should be judged purely on how often an expression is used in that language. You can say that the pronunciation "haych" is incorrect, but if every second English speaker says it, who gives a damn? Or the old "Me and him" vs "Him and I", the former can easily be considered correct considering that most English speakers use it.

Back to teaching kids how to be mindless drone test takers rather than giving them a real education. Appearance of quality learning over actually teaching something of substance. Just like in (insert your country here), conservatives are making the rest of society dumber-er.
学んで思わざれば則ち罔し。思うて学ばざれば則ち殆うし。

supermario Wrote:

Tzadeck Wrote:Probably Japan's sinking test scores are related more to the rise of other social problems

Which social problems? I am really interested, because I think the reason a lot of American schools are failing is as much a social problem as a policy problem. Where I went to school, if a kid valued his or her education, the kid could generally succeed in school. There were some exceptions, but that was generally the case. Those who didn't want to learn, however, simply didn't learn.

Well, part of it is probably a rising poverty rate over the last ten years. Generally the poorest families in Japan are those with single mothers; the problem is made worse by low wages for women. There are a whole lot of single mother families living below the poverty line, and the divorce rate is increasing (as of 2003, there were over a million single mothers in Japan, more than a 20% increase over five years). Some of such families are poor enough that the mother has trouble making enough money to feed the kids. I've also read a couple of articles that talk about how the child-support systems sucks. Not enough food, and a mother that doesn't have time to help her child with school, both are obvious causes of worse school performance.

Part of it is also that family relationships are not as strong as they used to be, so that the extended family is less likely to help out even in this kind of situation.

There are also social problems that often directly concern school children. One of these is bullying, and another is people who refuse to accept social life. Though, it'd probably be dishonest to say that this is a social problem causing school problems. That's because it's probably simultaneously a social problem causing a school problem, as well as a school problem causing a social problem. Bullying is probably largely the result of the pressure put on children in school. Nevertheless, it's become something of a trend among kids, and kids who are bullied often stop taking their school work seriously.

Many students often refuse to go to school, or almost never go (extreme cases of this are called futoko, or hikikomori if they don't leave the house at all)--sometimes as a result of being bullied, sometimes because they can't handle the pressure of grades, as well as for various other reasons and problems. Obviously, students who rarely go to school do worse on tests, etc. Some people who reject school life reject social life in general for their entire lives.

I'm sure there's a whole bunch, and if you look up social problems in Japan it's not hard to imagine how they could hurt how well kids do in school.

bodhisamaya Wrote:Back to teaching kids how to be mindless drone test takers rather than giving them a real education. Appearance of quality learning over actually teaching something of substance.

Ironically, a lot of the time I feel it's only during the tests that students actually have to apply and therefore cement their knowledge. If anything there should be more testing after all testing is SRSing but less importance placed on end of term exams. Students are terribly spoon-fed most of the time. They are effectively given the answers and then retested on them later in the year. English ought to be taught like math. I.e Teacher briefly explains some new concept and then the rest of the lesson students are solving problems while the teacher goes around helping. Students suck at reading because they rarely have to do it themselves, and if they did the teachers would actually have to learn how to explain things like phonics/grammar properly to answer student questions. Students suck at listening because they are rarely made to listen to raw English and figure out what it means independently without it effectively being translated for them before or after. They suck at speaking, because they mostly just read from scripts, so they are never forced to independently apply rules relating to grammar (word order etc). Same goes for writing. Student 作文 are almost always copied from some model and just use word substitution. While most of the teachers I've worked with are genuinely nice people who care about their students, probably less than half of them actually get how to teach a language. Add to this the fact that their job is basically to go through the checklist of English grammar points in the set order and way presented in the glossy and friendly (but largely substance-less) textbook in a year, and teachers have rather little flexibility to change much. Students use something like five or more different workbooks and textbooks each year, but all they really need is one decently written book with plenty of example sentences to properly explain grammar and phonics. It's not all bad though. I've seen gradual improvement in curriculum in my three years living here.

>nadiatims

I respectfully disagree, for a few reasons.
Firstly, I think the current school structure is on a whole, archaic and completely unnecessary. In other words, schooling has become a nuisance. Different people learn differently and want to study different things; school ignores this and enforces its own curriculum, own boring and useless teaching methods, own schedule, environment and social structure, and to top it off, its compulsory. School can provide a half-decent environment in which to focus, but generally doesn't and doesn't teach kids how to focus without such a fake environment, aka the 'real world'. Anyway, libraries are far easier to focus at than schools.

As for testing, there a number reasons I disagree with testing:
1. It's useless. What are our long terms goals here? To achieve good grades, or to actually remember things? If schools are serious, then they must eventually switch over to an SRS based teaching method, rather than testing. Why should we force kids to endure a 13 year or so program when they're guaranteed to forget everything they 'learn' within a few years?
2. Progress is personal. It shouldn't be anyone else's business except the student's, and perhaps their family, on how they are learning. No one should have the liberty of taking a measure on someone's ability and being able to tell them they suck. Especially when this judgment is in relation to their own criteria.
3. Testing is stressful. Constantly preparing for and doing well in tests can be extremely stressful for students. Enough said.

Anyway, that's just my opinion, I don't want to get into a debate on the topic.

Yours sincerely, a frustrated student.

bodhisamaya Wrote:Back to teaching kids how to be mindless drone test takers rather than giving them a real education. Appearance of quality learning over actually teaching something of substance. Just like in (insert your country here), conservatives are making the rest of society dumber-er.

How do you teach a child to be a mindless drone test taker?
Isn't Anki the same thing, except with tests?
Doesn't learning begin with memorization?

thecite Wrote:...If schools are serious, then they must eventually switch over to an SRS based teaching method, rather than testing. Why should we force kids to endure a 13 year or so program when they're guaranteed to forget everything they 'learn' within a few years?

You don't forget _everything_ you learned. Only most of it. And how do you learn/remember how to write a five paragraph essay (pretty useless skill anyway but...) with Anki?

Why do you still know the fact "1+1=2"? It has come up _so_ many times in your life that you're likely to not forget it again. Other basic facts fall into this category. You don't still know the Krebs cycle because it has never come up in your life after you first learned about it. I still know the fact "Krebs cycle = method used by mitochondria to produce energy" but that's about it. I'm not sorry I forgot all those sub-facts either - it was really pretty useless to learn about. Interesting - but useless.

Should kids start Anki when they're ready to learn some basic facts? I don't think kids need help with letters of the alphabet (as in the Supermemo close delete example: fill in the missing letters c.....g). When kids are ready to learn 1+1=2, should they begin using Anki? When kids learn addition tables (this is how your knowledge of addition ends up), should they begin to use Anki to memorize them?

@ thecite
I agree with much of what you say actually, and most schools in their current model are probably more of a nuisance than a benefit (at least for people who can self-study). However schools in theory should be amazing. I mean who wouldn't want to be go to a place where you can learn real knowledge and skills from people with experience? I
Testing isn't bad. It's all the heavily weighted exams, cramming and ranking of students relative to each other that is the problem. If students were required to actually use the knowledge they acquire in a recursive fashion regularly enough throughout a year they would never even have to study for exams. The exams would be a walk in the park for anyone who completed the course. Students should get a simple pass or fail, and a breakdown showing how they went.

our system can do no better than detect a variance from optimum and apply a full-tilt corrective in the opposite direction. and so the pendulum swings. we lurch from one to the other extreme. it's a fundamental limitation of our "worst-except-for-all-others" system.

jcdietz03 Wrote:When kids learn addition tables (this is how your knowledge of addition ends up), should they begin to use Anki to memorize them?

why (exactly) not?
john von neumann, who probably knew more math than any of his contemporaries, had a line that went something like "young man, in mathematics one never understands anything, one only gets used to things." memory is as important in math as is "understanding".

In an educator's standpoint, there's nothing more delightful than to teach a kid how to teach himself. However, there are times when memorizing large seas of information is also necessary, as it is a quick way to flatter non-education types, and it's those folks who pay our salary :p

jcdietz03 Wrote:I'm not a scientist. Why do I need understanding of science? I am a validation specialist. I am annoyed when my co-workers cannot do a simple lethality calculation.
It's on page 13 of this document (couldn't find on wikipedia - must be an education problem ). And then times time for accumulated lethality which predicts sterilization effectiveness. It's simple algebra. About half the people in my department cannot do it. We use a computer to do this calculation always. But it is simple enough - I think you should be able to do it by hand so you understand how it works.

What the science thing a serious question? It's off-topic, but...

Anyway, scientific knowledge in the hard sciences has the distinction of being the type of knowledge we have that is most likely to be correct. Knowledge from the hard sciences is pervasive enough that it can be used in a ridiculous wide variety of fields and ways--science can and does inform about basic ways we look at our life, and can be helpful in making decisions when we are carrying out our responsibilities as citizens of our respective countries.

In other words, science relates to absolutely everybody's life.

More importantly, people should learn about the method of science. What are the good points of the way information is learned in science? What is the difference between information discovered via the scientific method versus other methods?

Anyone who does this will have a much easier time looking at various ideas presented to them and understanding how to think of those ideas. As an American, should I be a democrat, a republican, in another party, or should I not be part of a party at all? Should I buy a book about herbal medicines? Should I join Scientology? What should I think about abortion? How about stem cell research? If my back hurts, should I go to a chiropractor? How often should I go to a dentist? Should I go to a dentist at all? As a jury member, how should we interpret the expert witness who claims that it was arson due to the marks on the floor? Should I believe someone who writes a book about pedagogy techniques?

Seems like science can inform us on a lot of lifestyle decisions, even if it's not 100% a scientific matter. And, knowing how to tell if an idea is true or not is useful in any field. Even if we don't actually participate in science ourselves, and even if we can't do the mathematics ourselves (I certainly cannot do advanced mathematics, though I could do the lethality calculation), we can still be informed by sources for lay people.

Tzadeck Wrote:In other words, science relates to absolutely everybody's life.

More importantly, people should learn about the method of science. What are the good points of the way information is learned in science? What is the difference between information discovered via the scientific method versus other methods?

I think that science is, foremost, a philosophical stance towards the world, an attitude towards how we (a collective of individuals) should go about making sense of things, together, pooling our resources. I think that the principal failure of science education is the failure to make the case to students that this the is the philosophical stance towards the world that they should themselves adopt as theirs, identify with it, irrespective of how talented they may be as scientists or how far they ultimately go in developing their scientific expertise.

Nowadays every scientist is a complete layman relative to all science with the exception of a relatively small area of expertise. But he/she, even as a layman, retains that scientific stance towards his/her ignorance. Science education will succeed in the measure that it gets people to be like a "scientist outside of his/her area of expertise."

I don't mean to go off-topic here, but "what do you think of" is perfectly fine to me. If anything "what do you think about" sounds more foreign to my ears more than the former.
It's completely absurd to argue that one form of expression is incorrect let alone mark someone down for it.

gfb345 Wrote:Nowadays every scientist is a complete layman relative to all science with the exception of a relatively small area of expertise. But he/she, even as a layman, retains that scientific stance towards his/her ignorance. Science education will succeed only when it gets everyone to be like a "scientist outside of his/her area of expertise."

Is that not inevitable though?

Reminds me of a character from a certain TV series who, when asked "What is this, some kind of joke?" awkwardly and patronizingly responds, "That's what I'd like to know about it," with an obvious accent.

thecite Wrote:That's the stupid thing about English classes in general: apparently something is incorrect because the impenetrable laws of grammar say so. Surely 'correctness' should be judged purely on how often an expression is used in that language. You can say that the pronunciation "haych" is incorrect, but if every second English speaker says it, who gives a damn? Or the old "Me and him" vs "Him and I", the former can easily be considered correct considering that most English speakers use it.

*cough* I give a damn. "Me and him" vs "him and I" is a moot point, as both are grammatically incorrect. It's "he and I". And "haich" vs "aitch" tends to be divided along class lines (at least in the Eastern states). Draw from that what you will.

There's nothing wrong with using grammar incorrectly in a casual setting, so long as you know how to use it correctly when the need arises. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer people seem to possess that knowledge.

liosama Wrote:I don't mean to go off-topic here, but "what do you think of" is perfectly fine to me. If anything "what do you think about" sounds more foreign to my ears more than the former.

This is a perfect example of the above. Instinct tells me that "of" is incorrect, but if was talking to a friend I wouldn't care. If I was writing something academic or business-related, though, I'd use "about".

Meanwhile, the original article in the thread suggests the data on country rankings comes from the PISA test. I remember being randomly chosen to take that when I was 15! There was no warning - a teacher came into roll call one morning, grabbed half a dozen of us and chucked us in a room with a big fat test booklet. They gave us a highlighter as a thank you present afterward (so generous), and that's the last we heard of it. So they do use the data for something after all. Huh.